With respect to manufacturing operations of advanced device products such as semiconductor elements, HDDs, LCDs, plasma displays or PCBs, in some manufacturing operations such as a treatment which requires a chemical reaction, minute working or minute assembling, there may be a case that the advanced device products are manufactured by an automated manufacturing system, such as a robot or a machine tool without allowing an operator to directly perform the operations. Furthermore, there may be a case that the manufacturing system includes several tens to several hundreds of continuous operations. In addition, there may be a case that a half-completed product, which may be referred to by the term of art, “work,” is subject to a test in the course of the manufacturing process.
For example, in the manufacture of the HDDs, a plurality of magnetic-recording heads and magnetic-recording disks are assembled in the HDD together with other components such as a spindle motor and a disk enclosure; and, magnetic characteristics and a storage capacity of the HDD are tested in a plurality of continuous automated operations before the HDD is released as a product.
With respect to a PCB, minute electronic components such as semiconductor chips and capacitors are arranged on the PCB using an automatic machine; the minute electronic components are automatically affixed to the PCB in a soldering reflow furnace, and are subject to an electric test by an automatic machine before being completed as a product.
In such manufacturing operations of the products, the enhancement of the productivity of the automated manufacturing system is a crucial task from a viewpoint of recovering investments. In defining this enhancement of productivity as an output per unit time, to enhance the productivity, net operation time and auxiliary operation time are shortened. Particularly, in an automated manufacturing system, besides lowering the frequency of occurrence of perturbations to the system, shortening of the auxiliary operation time such as, shortening of a setup operation time, or alternatively, shortening of a standby time which stops the flow of work until the operation assumes a state which allows the conveyance of work are issues that draw the attention of manufacturing engineers to provide product at lower cost.